The Orthodox Hit Squad

Under Jewish law, a woman who wants out of her marriage can't just call 1-800-DIVORCE. The man has to initiate. And sometimes he needs a little. persuasion. Maybe a visit from henchmen with cattle prods. Or the old Taser-to-the-balls trick. After a few hours of this kind of torture, the stubborn husband will sign pretty much anything. One powerful rabbi (yes, a rabbi!) has allegedly employed this system for decades, operating with total impunity—until now

You’re a young Israeli man named Meir Bryskman. It’s a cool October night in 2010, and you’ve just stepped off a bus in downtown Lakewood, New Jersey. Pulling your dark overcoat across your chest, you walk northeast in the direction of the Metedeconk River. The sidewalks are empty, but you’ve made this journey before and have no reason to be nervous. Lakewood—at various points a railroad town, an iron town, and a resort town for claustrophobic New Yorkers—is these days known for its dense population of Orthodox Jews, who cluster there to be close to Beth Medrash Govoha, one of the largest yeshivas in the world. As a typist for Hebrew texts, that’s why you’re there, too. To be among your people.

Shortly before midnight, you arrive at the rambling brick home of David Wax, a prominent local rabbi who’s hired you to do some work. You’re greeted warmly and shown upstairs to a second-story bedroom, expecting to spend the next few hours poring over Talmudic scripture.

But no sooner have you crossed the bedroom’s threshold than you catch a fist that breaks your nose. Then you feel yourself lifted from behind by two sets of big hands and driven down into the floor. Lesson learned. You lie still.

You’re flat on your stomach now, blindfolded, hands cuffed behind your back, ankles tied together. As far as you can tell, there are three men—the two attackers, whose gruff voices you don’t recognize, and Wax, whom you know from his nasal honk. You hear the door being shut and footsteps retreating down the hall, and for a moment it seems the worst is over. Then the door is opening again, and you feel heavy wire being wrapped around your arms. Your hands go tingly and then numb.

Before dawn breaks over Lakewood, you’ll be subjected to a carnival of torture techniques. You’ll be presented with a body bag—"for you to get used to the size." You’ll be presented with acid and feel it burn your skin. You’ll be told your next stop is the Poconos, where you’ll be eaten alive by rats. You’ll be told not to move, unless you want a stream of piss on your forehead.

And you’ll be told that all the torment—all the crippling embarrassment—will halt only if you agree to sign what’s known as a get: a document releasing your wife from marriage. The choice is simple, your captors say: "A divorce or a funeral."

In Orthodox tradition, a man and his wife enter wedlock by signing their names to the ketubah, the traditional prenuptial agreement, both knowing that only the man, the head of the household, is allowed to terminate the relationship. A husband’s refusal to do so creates an agunah out of his powerless wife—she becomes, literally, a "chained" woman.

Bryskman’s wife claimed to be just that. A few months earlier, she and her husband had found themselves embroiled in particularly acrimonious separation proceedings in an Israeli rabbinical court. She moved out of the house they shared, took the kids with her, and forbade her husband from seeing them. She claimed he was an unfit father. She insisted upon a divorce. He wouldn’t agree.

On the advice of his rabbis, Bryskman flew from Israel to America, where he had some family—only to find on this night in Lakewood that his marital problems, far from being left behind in Israel, had followed him across the Atlantic.

Peeking through a gap in the blindfold, he caught a glimpse of Wax in a cartoonishly large white cowboy hat. "Do you like my hat?" Wax asked before delivering a few kicks to the ribs. Bryskman raised his head, revealing a spreading pool of blood.

"You ruined my carpet!" Wax squealed. Adequately terrified, Bryskman agreed to his tormentor’s terms. He would grant the get—anything to save his life. Line by line, he was led through the process:

...Hereby I do release thee and send away and put thee aside that thou mayest have permission and control over thyself to go to be married to any man whom thou desirest and no man shall hinder you in my name...

At 3 A.M., Wax hustled Bryskman downstairs and into a waiting taxi. He ordered the driver to take them both toward Brooklyn. On the way, he phoned Bryskman’s father, Zalman, in Israel. Wax said he had a team on the ground there; as proof, he named a fast-food spot where Zalman had recently dined. If Zalman didn’t wire $100,000 to the family of Bryskman’s wife, Wax would have both Bryskman and Zalman murdered. "For you, there’s a special gift," he told Zalman. "It’s called a bullet...in your head."

Bryskman was deposited, bloody and aching, at the doorstep of his cousin’s apartment in central Brooklyn. Meanwhile, Wax turned back for Lakewood, apparently untroubled by the possibility that Bryskman might rat him out. After all, ultra-Orthodox Jews consider it blasphemous to involve secular authorities in a dispute that should be rightly settled in the community. But at this point Bryskman no longer cared.

Later that same day, lying in a bed at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, he told his story to several law-enforcement officials. A search warrant was issued; Wax was arrested; his Lakewood house was tossed. Upstairs, investigators found a large white cowboy hat and an invoice from Step on Me Carpet & Flooring for a $1,311.10 emergency carpet installation.

Wax, prosecutors would later allege, was part of a criminal syndicate "engaged in the business of kidnapping and torturing people, beating them up, tying them up, shocking them with Tasers and stun guns until they got what they wanted"—a group of hit men that had allegedly been abducting and assaulting recalcitrant husbands across the tristate area for decades, to the tune of one forced get every year.

In May, David Wax pleaded guilty to his role in the kidnapping of Meir Bryskman. But he told the court that he had done the hit on behalf of someone else, a man purported to be the mastermind of the forced-get ring, a man known as the Prodfather: a 69-year-old gray-bearded, frazzle-haired father of eight—and grandfather of forty-four—named Rabbi Mendel Epstein.

In the secular world, we enter relationships voluntarily, and we exit them the same way. Our entire modern romantic outlook is predicated on this fact. We choose our mate, and if we fuck up—or if they fuck up, or if it just doesn’t work—we can wave good-bye. There are no rabbinical courts or ancient laws holding us back.

As Rabbi Epstein writes in his 1989 book, A Woman’s Guide to the Get Process, outside of Orthodox circles "people often divorce casually, for mere incompatibility, immaturity or absorption with their careers or lusts. But this is not true in the religious world. In over 30 years of counseling, I have never met a frum"—pious—"couple that divorced due to incompatibility alone. When frum people divorce, it is because one spouse is abusive and the healthy one feels endangered, physically and emotionally."

For at least three decades, Epstein has been the most feared divorce lawyer in the so-called black-hat community of New York and New Jersey—a loose collection of Hasidic sects and Orthodox congregations that spills across Brooklyn and low-lying Lakewood and the rural reaches of Kiryas Joel, up near Poughkeepsie. And yet he’s never gone to law school; he’s not licensed to practice law in New York State or New Jersey or anywhere else.

He is a to’ein—an advocate in the three-man rabbinical court known as a beit din, or "house of justice." In Orthodox society, which can be so insular it employs its own unofficial police force, the beit din is both small-claims court and counseling service. Have trouble collecting an outstanding debt from your tightfisted neighbor? Visit a beit din. Need advice on how to bury your mother? See the beit din. Want out of a marriage? Sign a get at your local beit din for ratification.

The hitch comes when a husband refuses to participate in the process. Suddenly his wife, who may have been pressed into an arranged marriage and now has a handful of screaming kids on her hands and very little money of her own—to say nothing of education or the means to make a living, which in ultra-Orthodox circles, where men are always the breadwinners, is pretty much out of the question, anyway—is officially an agunah, chained to a marriage that is functionally dead.

Situations like this are Epstein’s specialty. His reputation was founded on extricating trapped women from marriage; by his own count, he has personally supervised 2,000 divorce cases. Success, Epstein has bragged, is merely a matter of finding "the right buttons to push to aggravate the husband so that he wants out of his self-imposed predicament." Depending on how much you’re willing to spend, those buttons might include harassment (in his book, Epstein recalls once following a husband into a dance club and remaining there until that meshuggener, pink-faced and utterly ashamed, put pen to paper) or, perhaps, alternate measures. To his enemies, he’s a menace and a bully. To his admirers, though, he’s a hero—a liberator.

As such, Epstein has scarcely tried to hide what he does. In Orthodox circles, his work isn’t just an open secret—it’s barely a secret at all. "For a long time," says Monty Weinstein, a New York therapist who frequently counsels Orthodox clients, "it was always his name that came up. He was beating guys up, he was giving them bloody noses, he was using cattle prods. He had a gang of thugs, and he had a van, and he’d scoop you right off the street."

Bell-shaped and wizened, with protuberant blue eyes and a wide forehead, Epstein speaks in a gravelly New York accent, punctuating his observations with blasts of Yiddish. He’s fond of quoting Maimonides ("A woman is not a prisoner who should be forced to live with the man she hates") and the Jewish sages of yore: "Ein adam dor im nachash bekefifa achas—you can’t live with a snake."

An ultra-Orthodox woman named Henny Kupferstein recently told me the story of her arranged marriage, at the age of 18, to a man she soon came to think of as a controlling monster. "I was taught that the only reason that you’re in this world is to serve your husband," says Kupferstein, who has round cheeks the shade of burnished apples and beautiful long brown hair—her own, she points out, after years of shaving her head and wearing a wig, as married frum women must. "It never occurred to me that there was a way out," she went on. "I was going to get married as a teenager and have babies every year, and I would be a grandmother at 39. It would be fabulous. What wasn’t fabulous was that my life didn’t go that way. My marriage was a trauma that lasted for fourteen years."

Eventually, Kupferstein left her husband. But her husband denied her the get, and at the age of 32, Kupferstein was adrift, "cut off from everyone and anyone. Little kids would cross the street to get away from me. I was an outcast."

Kupferstein turned to Epstein, who received the desperate woman in the living room of his Brooklyn home. The light was dim, and the tables were piled high with papers. The walls were lined with portraits of community leaders and photographs of Epstein shaking hands with various Orthodox dignitaries.

Kupferstein was led to a chair. Almost immediately, she felt comfortable—she was in the presence of someone who understood.

Epstein, Kupferstein says, "seemed to have this inside understanding of women’s emotions—he validated you when you explained why the marriage was breaking down. He nodded. And that nodding was enough to encourage you—to make you believe your thoughts were legit, which is far more than you get from other men in your community. Here’s a guy who wears a beard that gets it."

A few months later, with Epstein’s help, Kupferstein was released from her marriage, without blood loss, through a series of hearings in the local beit din. Still, Kupferstein has no doubt that had things not gone her way in the beit din, Epstein would have suggested tactics "outside the normal channels," as Epstein himself has described his more aggressive methods. She would need only to have said the word.

Epstein first gained notoriety outside the black-hat world in the late 1990s, when several men, all in the midst of divorce and custody battles, went public with tales of back-alley assaults at the hands of masked madmen. One was shot in the ass. Another suffered facial burns. Each blamed his problems on Epstein and one of his colleagues, the revered Orthodox rabbi Martin Wolmark. For a certain kind of husband—the kind who believed in his heart that women were meant to be subservient and that the whole agunah issue was merely a matter of secular political correctness run awry—Epstein became a bogeyman. He was the malevolent spirit from Yiddish folktales, the dybbuk. You didn’t want him darkening your doorstep.

And like a dybbuk, he seemed impossible to bring down by earthly means. Accusations bounced right off him. Part of the reason, of course, is that many in the community didn’t want their star to’ein to be caught. He may have been rough, but he was also a crusader for women’s rights. "I came to believe that Epstein was a sociopath at a very high level," Kupferstein told me. "He straddled both worlds: religious and criminal. He loves his own children, he loves his God, he’s capable of love, but he’s capable of criminal behavior at the same time. It’s like Breaking Bad."

Untouchable

The authorities have been aware of Mendel Epstein for quite some time. Here, an abridged history of previous allegations against the Prodfather. —M.S.

1996: Brooklyn rabbi Abraham Rubin alleges that a gang of thugs under the command of Mendel Epstein and Martin Wolmark kidnapped him and set a stun gun to his genitals. The case is dropped.

1998: Inspired by Rubin, accountant Stephen Weiss comes forward, alleging that his jaw, leg, and arm were broken in 1992 by members of a ring run by Epstein and Wolmark. No arrests are made.

1998:Newsday interviews an additional dozen residents of Brooklyn’s Borough Park and Midwood neighborhoods, all of whom claim that they’ve been harassed, threatened, or assaulted by men working for their estranged wives. The Brooklyn district attorney agrees to look into the charges but, despite pressure from the victims, declines to prosecute.

On August 14, 2013, a pair of prospective clients—a brother and sister I’ll call Ben and Leah—show up at the doorstep of a home Epstein keeps in Lakewood. They find him inside, clad in his traditional uniform of black coat, white shirt, black pants. A few years earlier, Ben explains, he’d introduced his sister to one of his partners in the real estate business, a man we’ll refer to as Moshe.

Ben liked Moshe, and Leah liked Moshe, and the match initially seemed blessed by God. But shortly after the marriage was consummated, cracks appeared in the facade. Moshe was having financial issues, which bothered the frum Leah; worse yet, he didn’t want children. Leah decided on a divorce. But there was a snag: Ben and Moshe were still business partners, and Moshe had conveniently remembered that Ben owed him some money.

Now, they tell Epstein, Moshe is squirreled away in South America, refusing the get until this debt is repaid.

Even beyond the logistical challenges, there’s still the question of money. Liberating an agunah isn’t cheap. Ben and Leah will have to pay ten grand to the rabbinical court that would take their case, and an additional $50K to $60K to the "tough guys" required to extract the get.

A plan emerges: Moshe will be lured north to New Jersey under false pretenses and thrown into the back of a van. "Basically what we’re going to be doing," Epstein says, "is kidnapping a guy for a couple of hours and beating him up and torturing him and then getting him to give the get."

Ben is skeptical. He knows his business partner—Moshe isn’t the type of guy to simply back down.

"Wait a second here," Epstein says. "I guarantee you that if you’re in the van, you’d give a get to your wife. You probably love your wife, but you’d give a get when they finish with you," he continues. "Hopefully there won’t even be a mark on him."

"You can leave a mark," Ben laughs.

"No, no, no. We—"

"I know. I understand what you’re saying."

"We prefer not to leave a mark. Because when they go to the police, the police look at the guy...;"

Luckily, Epstein has methods that don’t cause any blood loss: "We take an electric cattle prod...;"

"Electric cattle prod," Leah repeats. "Okay."

"If it can get a bull that weighs five tons to move...; You put it in certain parts of his body and in one minute the guy will know."

Ben and Leah don’t need to hear anything more: They hire Mendel Epstein on the spot.

Two months later, at 8 A.M. on October 9, a pair of dark minivans pull around the back of an aging warehouse in a waterfront tract of New Jersey, where Ben is waiting. He’s already wired Epstein a $20K down payment—with the rest contingent on services rendered.

The team runs through the plan one last time: In a few minutes, Ben will go collect Moshe, who has flown up from South America believing he’s being shown a new piece of property. Once inside the warehouse, Moshe will be jumped. Of paramount importance is to keep him away from the windows, so nobody outside sees anything suspicious.

While Ben watches, the men prepare their work clothes. Some wear black ski masks. Some have bandannas pulled over their faces in the manner of Wild West outlaws. One man is wearing a zombie mask, another a black Metallica T-shirt. A third has yanked a big trash bag over his torso—perhaps a blood-splatter prophylactic, in case this particular get requires leaving a mark after all.

Twenty minutes later, Ben exits the warehouse and walks out to his car. At 8:23 P.M., the eight men hear a sound at the door. Within seconds, they find themselves ambushed by an FBI Specialized Weapons and Tactics team. There is shouting, the squeak of thick-soled boots, the glare of rail-mounted tactical lights. The goons put their hands up.

FBI agents fan out across the room. In one corner, they discover an array of gear: feather quills and ink and paper to record the get, plus rope, a screwdriver, and most ominously, a clutch of surgical blades.

As these items are being bagged, additional agents are serving search warrants on the homes of Epstein and Wolmark and the other alleged members of the ring, in hopes of drumming up enough evidence to land the Prodfather in prison for life.

Unable to fathom the possibility that he’d be on the receiving end of a sting, much less one pulled off with such panache, Epstein had been fooled at every turn. There was never a Moshe, with his money-grubbing ways and interest in corporate real estate. There’d never been an agunah called Leah or a protective brother named Ben. There were only "Ben" and "Leah," undercover FBI agents working out of the bureau’s Newark office.

In their many conversations with Epstein, both in person and on the phone, Ben and Leah were always careful to use a recorder. The resulting transcripts, detailed in court documents, have provided both the basis for this story and what Joseph Gribko, the assistant U.S. attorney on the case, has called "overwhelming evidence" against Epstein. On these tapes, Epstein describes not only what he will have done to Moshe but exactly how much he expects to be paid for it. It is the approach of someone who cannot imagine ever being arrested.

Six of the eight men present at the warehouse on October 9 have pleaded guilty to traveling in interstate commerce to commit extortion. Their statements to law enforcement, in conjunction with the tapes recorded by Ben and Leah, yield what the assistant U.S. attorney’s office believes is a clear portrait of an organization akin to the Bloods, the Crips, or the Mafia.

In May of this year, a grand jury indicted Epstein and Wolmark on multiple counts of kidnapping. They each face the possibility of twenty-five years to life in a federal penitentiary. At 69 years old and in increasingly poor health—obese, pre-diabetic, and a survivor of open-heart surgery—Epstein cannot afford prison time. So he is determined to fight. He and Wolmark have pleaded not guilty.

In an e-mailed statement, Robert G. Stahl, Epstein’s attorney, indicated that at least part of his strategy will be to depict Epstein himself as the abused party. "When all the facts and evidence come out, it will be apparent that the government is on the wrong side of a terrible social injustice," Stahl said. "By inserting itself into a complicated religious issue, the government has interfered with the complex religious tenets of an Orthodox Jewish marriage and divorce process. Rabbi Epstein has helped scores of abused women for some thirty years equal the playing field in a male-dominated religious world."

A jury trial is scheduled for early next year in New Jersey. In the meantime, Epstein is out on $1 million bail, provided mostly by his family.

These days Epstein’s Brooklyn home is shuttered and locked, the windows of his old office boarded over with graffitied plywood. Despite dispensation from a judge allowing regular passage to a nearby shul, Epstein seems to remain sequestered with his wife and family. He rarely appears in public and has denied all requests to comment on his case.

In early May, I decided to drive down from New York to see him in New Jersey. The day was stormy, and along Lakewood’s leafy back roads, rainwater coursed through the gutters. I parked at the end of a cul-de-sac near the town center and followed a cement walk to Epstein’s front door.

The two-story house, with its clay-colored paint job and chipped black shutters, was falling into disrepair. Trash was scattered across the front yard; yellowing newspapers were piled on the porch. I knocked and then tried the bell, and got no response. I went back to my car to wait.

A few minutes later, there was a flicker of movement in an upstairs window, and Epstein appeared at the glass, his face moony and pale, his white hair protruding at odd angles. Only a fool would attempt to read minds, but it was impossible not to see the palpable sadness of a once powerful man brought low. The twilight of a self-modeled hero. All traces of him had been scrubbed out of a neighborhood where he had long ercised his will so audaciously. Now he was confined to a house with a garbage-strewn lawn. He wasn’t even bothering to brush his own hair. As I watched, he drew the blinds shut.

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